


A Long Story

by Deannie



Series: Young Mister Ryan and His Undercover Cousin [1]
Category: Castle, The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Cousins, Episode: s06e11 Under Fire, Gen, Magnificent Seven AU: ATF, a special crossover event
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 13:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5667919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kevin didn’t forget time zones. And he never forgot Ezra’s schedule. The only time in recent history Kevin had cold called him in the middle of the night, the cop had spent an evening being drowned in a vat of ice water… Something had happened. (takes place after the <i>Castle</i> episode "Under Fire.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Long Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mendax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mendax/gifts).



> This is for Mendax, who I hate.

Ed Scarlotti was, to be blunt, a thug and a murderer. He didn’t look like much—thin, weasley, greasy black hair and muddy brown eyes, sickly complexion… Nobody would notice him if he walked into a place.

Which was why he was paid to walk into places. He’d made a decent living in New York and Chicago killing people right under everyone’s nose, so it was no surprise that when word went out that he’d relocated to Denver, one of the larger syndicates in the area was just dying to use him to remove a major, ATF-sized, thorn in their side.

He was tired now, at three-thirty in the morning, from a job very well done. He’d gotten his man. Men, actually. And though the price had been a black eye that would likely be swollen shut in not too many hours, it had been a supremely satisfying night’s work. He put his coat on the hook by the door, locked his gun securely in the drawer under the phone, and headed for the bathroom.

The contacts came out first—his eyes had been aching with them in for the last… however long it had been—then a long, warm, careful scrub with cleanser to strip away makeup that aged and roughened and added just the right sallow touch to rosy cheeks. His hair took the longest, washed five times and more to start to turn it from black to a more pleasing brown.

So it was that at four-fifteen in the morning, ATF undercover agent Ezra Standish stepped out of his shower and smiled at himself in the mirror for the first time in a week. Ed Scarlotti was back in mothballs where he belonged. The ATF-created assassin had served his purpose and would escape federal custody to be used in some other sting someday, his identity safe because the same agent rarely used him twice. Manny Schultz and half his family were headed to a very real federal prison on weapons charges and conspiracy to commit murder, and the six men who’d formed Ezra’s unlikely circle of friends were safe as houses—or as safe as a group of elite ATF agents could be.

Ezra sighed contentedly, shrugging into his robe and heading for the wet bar for something to help him come down from the adrenalin. He’d sleep, get comfortable in his own skin again, and be back at it again tomorrow. In the late afternoon, perhaps.

He sat on his leather couch, luxuriating in the feel of something that wasn’t cheap and dusty and expected of an assassin who prided himself in blending in.

He was home.

The silence was interrupted by a chirping cellphone. His personal cellphone—the one he left here in his apartment when he was undercover. He levered himself up and headed for the locked drawer where it lived, shaking his head. “Good Lord, Mother,” he whispered to himself. “You can con millionaires out of half their fortunes, but cannot calculate the time difference between Paris and Denver.”

He unlocked the drawer and pulled out the phone. And froze. KEVIN RYAN, the caller ID read, along with the grinning avatar of his younger cousin, a detective in the NYPD. Ezra had stayed with his aunt’s family when Kevin was a young child and the two had cemented a long-lived, if often unremarked-on, friendship. He was, in fact, one of Ezra’s favorite blood relations.

Anxiety rippled through him. He’d spoken to Kevin only a few days before this assignment started. His wife Jenny was expected to deliver their first child at any time, and Kevin had been the usual bundle of nerves; endearing in a beloved family member where it would have been annoying in anyone else. Ezra hadn’t had a chance—honestly hadn’t had the _thought_ —to check and make sure things were okay.

They clearly weren’t. Kevin didn’t forget time zones. And he never forgot Ezra’s schedule. The only time in recent history Kevin had cold called him in the middle of the night, the cop had spent an evening being drowned in a vat of ice water… Something had happened.

Ezra shook himself and answered the phone warily. “Kevin?”

A husky, raw voice only barely recognizable as his cousin’s answered him. “Hey, Ezra, you’re there.” The exhaustion in his voice didn’t quite mask a restrained excitement and Ezra’s fight-or-flight instinct stood down. “Damn, I’m sorry. I thought you’d—” a hacking, tearing cough ripped his voice away for a moment before he gained control. “Thought you’d still be on that undercover gig and I could just leave a message.”

“Well you have me now, Young Mister Ryan,” he said, striving for a light tone and tossing out the teasing nickname he’d used since witnessing a particularly harsh dressing down by one of the nuns at Kevin’s school. “I assume you have news?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said gently, a smile evident in the voice that was still rough and hard to listen to. “Um, since I already woke you up… are you decent? I got someone I want you to meet.”

The baby had finally come, then. Ezra looked down at himself and shrugged. “I only returned home an hour ago,” he said. “I expect if you and the lovely Jenny O’Malley can stand to see me in my robe, I could oblige.” The green request button went on instantly and he headed for the light switch to provide them some illumination on his end, accepting the change from voice to video on his way across the room.

The small phone screen showed a beautiful, impossibly tiny child, wrapped in a blanket. Ezra sighed. “Lord, she is lovely,” he breathed, something about seeing a new life after dealing with killers for the last week touching him more than it should. “What’s your name, little one?”

The phone switched from its rear- to its front-facing camera as Ezra reached the light switch and flipped it on. Kevin panned the selfie camera up to show Jenny holding and gazing at the little girl, an exhausted smile on her face. “See, Kevin,” she said. “ _He_ can tell she’s a girl.” Jenny shook her head, never taking her eyes from her child. “Her name is Sarah Grace. Kevin says she looks like Winston Churchill.”

“All babies look like Winston Churchill,” Kevin replied breathlessly. There were a series of very painful grunts and the image panned and dipped ridiculously for a moment in that way video calls did. Ezra looked at the picture of a hospital ceiling in New York City and listened.

“Kevin, they said you shouldn’t—” Jenny said, a thread of some recently-spent panic flaring in her tone.

“I’m fine, Jenny,” Kevin responded, though it was clear from the hitch in his voice that he was anything but. The picture finally righted itself and Ezra scrutinized the new addition to the scene. In the camera’s frame, Kevin sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed, his arm around Jenny. He wore hospital scrubs and his face was too clean, while his hair was grimy and slicked back. There were bruises, light but visible in the harsh fluorescents, ghosting along one side of his jaw, paired with a large patch of scabbing skin on his cheek.

“Oh my God, Ezra!” Kevin said, getting a good look at him for the first time, a chuckle trying to bubble up and make him cough again. “What happened to your face?”

The question had Jenny looking up finally and hissing in sympathy at the black eye. “Oh, that looks like that hurts.”

Ezra sighed. “It does indeed, my dear,” he replied, his eyes on his cousin. “Though seeing you two beautiful women helps immeasurably.”

Nothing was wrong with Jenny and the perfect Miss Sarah Grace, obviously, but there was something very, very wrong with Kevin. “What, exactly, has been going on there?” he asked pointedly. “Besides the obvious?”

Suddenly Kevin’s eyes were full of shadows and Jenny’s eyes were full of tears. Kevin leaned over to kiss his wife’s forehead and gave Ezra a painful-looking shrug. “Um… It’s a long story?” he replied, a pleading in the tone and the crooked smile that begged for him to be let out of the discussion for the moment.

Ezra nodded, his tone still stern. “But everyone—” he put a knowing emphasis on the word— “is okay. Yes?”

Some of the shadows fled as Kevin looked off to the side at something out of Ezra’s sight. He coughed heavily for a moment. “Yeah,” Kevin assured him, grinning at whatever he saw and then focusing back on Ezra with a full, contented smile. “Yeah. Everyone’s okay.” He chuckled without setting himself off again. “Everyone’s great.”

Ezra allowed a smile to break over his own face, pulling on his swollen eye socket. “Then I will look forward to hearing all about it at a later date.” He sighed dramatically. “Now, if I may find my bed? Please?”

Jenny giggled at that, jostling the small babe, who now looked in danger of waking.

“Sorry, cuz,” Kevin said. “Seriously. I really did think that you were… You said it was going to be a long case, but I didn’t want to wait to tell you…” He tried to see through the phone, right into Ezra. “Are you good?” he asked seriously. “Your team?”

“Right as rain, Young Mister Ryan,” Ezra replied, comfort at the truth of the statement warming him as much as his cousin’s concern. “Right as rain.”

Kevin grinned like a boy. “Good. That’s great, Ezra.” Sarah Grace had had enough of the proceedings and began to fuss in earnest. “Um, I better go—”

“ _Would you get out of that bed and let the woman feed the baby?_ ” The irascible tone could only come from Kevin’s friend Lanie. The camera panned and dipped and Ezra began to feel slightly seasick watching it.

“ _Better listen to her, man,_ ” a voice even more destroyed than Kevin’s spoke. It took a long moment for Ezra to identify it as that of Kevin’s partner, Javier Esposito. “ _She’s a mama cat today._ ”

Kevin let out more pained grunts, and looked to be barely balancing on his feet when the camera finally focused back on him. “Look, Ezra, I gotta go, okay?”

“I know you’ll call and tell me everything, once you get a free moment?” Ezra replied sternly.

“ _Hey, Ryan,_ ” Javier called heavily. “ _I think we’re in trouble. Take a look._ ”

Kevin looked over his phone’s camera at something beyond and sighed, his face falling. “Yeah… I may not have to,” he murmured in response to Ezra’s request. “Pretty sure you’ll figure it out yourself.”

“ _Ryan, sit your ass down before I call them to take you to a real hospital room,_ ” Lanie growled from off-stage.

“Gotta go, cuz,” Kevin said, and the transmission was abruptly ended.

Ezra snorted in amusement. “Lovely to hear from you, as always,” he muttered, placing the phone back in its place. He crossed back to his couch, too awake after the emotions of the call to find his bed quite yet. Whatever had happened, Kevin was clearly being his old, resilient self. And if he needed Ezra, God knew he knew where to find him.

He finished his drink and reached for the television remote, turning on the early morning news and letting the drone of it lull him toward rest.

“...power play on the Korean Peninsula continues.” The newscaster’s voice lightened. “And now, a heartwarming story out of New York, of the devotion between an NYPD officer and his pregnant wife.” Ezra roused himself at the mention of the NYPD and looked up at the big screen to see a burned and blown out warehouse with a title below that read _LOVE IN THE FLAMES—NYPD wife delivers baby while husband buried in explosion_. “Unwilling to leave the site of an explosion that buried her husband and his partner two floors below a raging inferno, Jenny Ryan went into labor in a waiting ambulance…”

“Good Lord, Kevin,” Ezra said to the empty room. “Can you _never_ do things by half!?” He played with the remote in his hand and looked at the collage of images of the building in question: blown out and crushed and burning... They’d have thought Kevin and Javier were dead. And the two of them wouldn’t have disagreed. Ezra knew that feeling from both sides.

“...reportedly, mother, child, and daddy are all expected to be just fine.”

He sighed. Fine was a relative term. Ezra leaned forward, considering the look in Kevin’s eyes—and more, the look in Jenny’s. He’d had a run of long undercover assignments lately, all to good effect. Surely Chris wouldn’t begrudge him a quick trip out to New York to see the new baby, right?

But for now, he would sleep. He switched off the television and dragged his increasingly exhausted self toward his silk sheets. He had a feeling he’d need all his strength to deal with this “long story.”

******  
the end


End file.
